Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions." Connected Sociologies
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Bhambra, Gurminder K. "Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions." Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 117–140. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781472544377.ch-006>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 14:17 UTC. Copyright © Gurminder K. Bhambra 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 6 Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions Postcolonial and decolonial arguments have been explicit in their challenge to the insularity of historical narratives and historiographical traditions emanating from Europe. This has been particularly so in the context of demonstrating the parochial character of arguments about the endogenous European origins of modernity in favour of arguments that suggest the necessity of considering the emergence of the modern world in the broader histories of colonialism, empire and enslavement. As postcolonial and decolonial criticisms have become increasingly common, however, proponents of more orthodox views often make minor adjustments and suggest that this is all now very familiar and that, while the critique may once have had cogency, its force now is only in relation to positions that have already been superseded. In this way, the approaches discussed in the earlier chapters, such as multiple modernities, often seek to supplement, or marginally modify, existing approaches in terms of their future application, rather than to transform them. In contrast, my argument is that the postcolonial and decolonial critique has not properly been acknowledged, let alone superseded. Importantly, as I have argued in previous chapters, any transformation of understandings would require a reconstruction ‘backwards’ of our historical accounts of modernity, as well as ‘forwards’ in terms of constructing a sociology adequate for our global (postcolonial) age. In this chapter, I examine the traditions of postcolonialism and decolonial thinking and discuss how their radical potential in unsettling and reconstituting standard 9781780931579_txt_print.indd 117 06/06/2014 11:09 118 Connected Sociologies processes of knowledge production might be drawn upon as part of a larger project for ‘connected sociologies’. The traditions of thought associated with postcolonialism and decoloniality are long-standing and diverse. Postcolonialism emerged as a movement consolidating and developing around the ideas of Edward W. Said, Homi K. Bhabha and Gayatri C. Spivak and drawing inspiration from the political movements for decolonization and the related scholar-activists associated with and central to such struggles. While much work in the area of Postcolonial Studies has directly addressed issues of the material, of the socioeconomic, there has also been a tendency for it to remain firmly in the realm of the cultural. This is no accident, given its intellectual provenance in the humanities more generally and English Literature more specifically. In contrast, the coloniality/modernity school emerged from the work of, among others, the sociologists Aníbal Quijano and María Lugones, and the philosopher and semiotician, Walter D. Mignolo. It was strongly linked to world systems theory from the outset as well as to scholarly work in development and underdevelopment theory and the Frankfurt School critical social theory tradition. More recently, it has sought to draw upon a broader range of theorists and activists from more diverse locations and across a longer time period. As well as a disciplinary difference, there is also a difference in geographical ‘origin’ and remit; that is, the geographical locations from where the scholars within the particular fields hail and the geographical focus of their studies. Postcolonialism emerged both as a consequence of the work of diasporic scholars from the Middle East and South Asia and, for the most part, refers back to those locations and their imperial interlocutors (Europe and the West/ North America). Decoloniality similarly emerged from the work of diasporic scholars from South America and, for the most part, refers back to those locations and their imperial interlocutors – again, primarily to Europe although addressing a much longer time frame. Whereas postcolonialism refers primarily to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, decoloniality starts with the earlier European 9781780931579_txt_print.indd 118 06/06/2014 11:09 Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions 119 incursions upon the lands that came to be known as the Americas from the fifteenth century onwards. There has been little work, thus far, bringing together the intellectual and material histories of these fields. This chapter is one contribution to this larger project as well as establishing the theoretical basis for the further elaboration of ‘connected sociologies’ in the final chapter. I Postcolonial Studies emerged as an academic field in the wake of the publication of Edward W. Said’s ground-breaking book, Orientalism (1995 [1978]). The contours of this field were further shaped by Homi K. Bhabha’s collection of essays, The Location of Culture (1994), and Gayatri C. Spivak’s preface to Derrida’s Of Grammatology and her oft-cited article, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1998). While this triumvirate of critical literary scholars formed the canonical hub of Postcolonial Studies, they were augmented by many others from across the humanities and social sciences. Alongside the inclusion of scholars associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Hall 1992; Gilroy 1993) and the Subaltern Studies collective (Guha 1982, 1983; Chakrabarty 2000), Postcolonial Studies was also defined by its retrospective inclusion of earlier scholar-activists such as Frantz Fanon (1963, 1967 [1952]), Albert Memmi (1965 [1957]), and Aimé Césaire (1972 [1955]). There are a number of excellent works outlining and summarizing the field as a whole (see, for example, Gandhi 1998; Loomba 2005; Mongia 2000) and it is not my intention to provide a comprehensive overview here, given the range of contribu- tions across the humanities and social sciences. Instead, I wish simply to pick up on some of the defining debates that have been significant in my articulation of postcolonial theory within the social sciences; this is a necessarily selective and incomplete account. While the humanities have engaged extensively with the idea of the postcolonial and with the field of Postcolonial Studies, the social sciences, generally, have been 9781780931579_txt_print.indd 119 06/06/2014 11:09 120 Connected Sociologies more resistant to rethinking in light of such interventions – whether those of Walter Rodney and Frantz Fanon in the 1960s or those subse- quent ones self-consciously defined as postcolonial. With Orientalism, not only did Said present a thorough-going critique of the arcane discipline of Oriental Studies, but he opened up the question of the production of knowledge from a global perspective. While he was not the first to address such a question, his positioning of it in the context of interrogating the Orient/Occident divide was novel. He unsettled the terrain of any argument concerned with the ‘universal’ by demonstrating how the idea of the universal was based both on an analytic bifurcation of the world and an elision of that bifurcation. This double displacement removed the ‘other’ from the production of an effective history of modernity. History became the product of the West in its actions upon others. At the same time, it displaced those actions in the idea that modernity was endogenous to the West and therefore removed the very question of the ‘other’ in history. In so doing, it also naturalized and justified the West’s material domination of the ‘other’ and in this way suggested the complicity between Orientalism as scholarly discourse and as imperial institution. It was no accident then, as Said suggests, that the movements for decolonization from the early twentieth century onwards should provoke a fundamental crisis within Orientalist thought; a crisis that fractures the complacent rendering of the ‘other’ as passive and docile and which challenges the assumptive conceptual framework underpinning such depictions. These defining arguments have been central to my research. The errors committed by the Orientalists, Said argues, were twofold: first, they got things wrong because there was no Orient to depict; second, the Orient they described was a misrepresentation. Critics of Said have suggested that making such an argument is contradictory as there can be no misrepresentation of something that does not exist (MacKenzie 1995; Irwin 2007). While the argument is complex, it is not unfathomable. As Said argues, ‘The Orient that appears in Orientalism … is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and 9781780931579_txt_print.indd 120 06/06/2014 11:09 Postcolonial and Decolonial Reconstructions 121 later, Western empire’ (1995 [1978]: 202–3). In setting up the Orient as the ‘other’ of the West, Orientalists cumulatively (along with other scholars) created something in conceptual terms that did not pre-exist its categorization. This was done by separating out conceptually parts of the world which were historically and empirically interconnected, resulting in two ideal types devoid of adequate